Multicolor Handwoven Wool Çal Cicim Village Kilim

A kilim almost exactly as wide as it is long: 126 × 130 cm (4'2" × 4'3"), handwoven in wool on a cotton warp at Çal, a district of Denizli in western Anatolia, and worked in the cicim technique. It is village work, stored rather than used, and there is one. Cicim is not so much a weave as a second weave laid over the first.

01The tone of the ground

The ground goes down as ordinary flat kilim, and while it rises the weaver carries extra colored yarns across it, wrapping them round the warps so that the figures stand a fraction above the surface.

02A line from the archive

Run a hand over one and the pattern can be felt before it is seen. The method is far slower than plain kilim, and it is the reason a cicim carries small dense figures where a kilim of the same size would carry a few large ones. Wool for the figures and the ground, cotton in the warp holding it all under tension — the usual village division, cotton for strength and wool for color. Çal sits inland from Denizli, in country that wove for its own houses far longer than it wove for sale.

03Where it sits in the house

A square kilim is an awkward object in a modern room, honestly: it will not fit a corridor, it is too small for a seating group, and it works best laid where a room turns a corner or hung flat where it can be read like a page.

04From the hand of the weaver

Cleaning by someone who handles kilim, not by a general rug service. Handwoven at Çal, Denizli province, western Türkiye. Wool figures and wool ground on a cotton warp. 126 × 130 cm (4'2" × 4'3") — square within four centimeters. Cicim: supplementary yarns wrapped over the ground weave, standing proud of it. Small, dense drawing, which is what the technique produces. A village weaving kept in storage rather than laid on a floor. Cleaning by a kilim specialist. A single piece. Square weavings usually end up on walls, and a cicim is the type that loses least by going there.